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Women in Science

Obtaining fellowship funding and other grants

Video clip: Krina highlights the importance of the centre of excellence environment where the work will be done when applying for fellowship funding. In some cases this may be sufficient to justify that moving to another centre is not desirable.

And during that period I also worked further on my endometriosis research and produced more publications, essentially leading up to my next fellowship application, which was to the Wellcome Trust and that was an Intermediate Career Development Fellowship, with the aim of starting, establishing my own group working on endometriosis.

Can you explain to people how you would go about doing that? Did you have to have a good plan of what you wanted to do?

Absolutely, absolutely. You have to thi-, you know, there’s a lot of thought that goes into such an application beforehand and a lot of talking to people about your ideas and whether they feel they are good ideas and to what extent there are different ways of looking at things. So, essentially you try and address a lot of the potential criticism that you might get from reviewers or from an interview panel beforehand. You try and think of all these issues.

Mm.

And that is essentially what a scientist does. You know, one thinks of a hypothesis and immediately tries to see where the holes are in that, in that thought process.

And I suppose you wanted a new idea so you’re seen as an independent person?

Absolutely, absolutely. That was really important as well. So the people I’d been working with here at the Wellcome Trust Centre and the Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology were hugely supportive in that, and realised that, one of the criteria of the Wellcome Trust, they really want to support young career scientists in developing an independent career.

Mm.

Quite often that means that they perhaps, you know, have requirements for you to do, to move and to do work elsewhere, which, which may or may not always be feasible. But I think the most important thing is that you have to propose to do the work in the place where, that’s most fitting for what you want to do. So clearly for me working on endometriosis where Oxford was one of the leading centres clinically looking at that condition.

Mm.

As well as wanting to study the genetic epidemiology of it, which the Wellcome Trust Centre is, you know, worldwide at the forefront of studying genetics of complex diseases, it was clear that you know this was the place for me. But, but, you know, I really had to think about that and, and justify that in the application.